During the working sessions of the current meeting of the Conference of African Ministers on Finance, Planning and Economic Development (CoM2023), Deputy Executive Secretary and Chief Economist of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Hanan Morsy, urged to embark on a path of fair structural development.
On this last aspect, Morsy specified that it could meet people’s needs, using industrialization and the African Continental Free Trade Area as catalysts.
“Africa has the highest proportion of poor people in the world at 54.8 percent in 2022, surpassing South Asia at 37.6 percent, and 546 million people were living in poverty in 2022, a 74 percent increase since 1990,” he said.
On the other hand, Stephan Karingi, director of ECA’s regional integration and trade department, warned that the continent continues to be constrained by huge infrastructure gaps with estimated annual funding needs of between $130 and $170 billion.
He confirmed that the annual financial gap is between $68 billion and $108 billion.
Opening the event the day before, Acting Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission Antonio Pedro pointed out that 58.8 percent of the 695 million poorest people in the world live in Africa.
“Women and girls remain particularly vulnerable, and we face a potential backlash from hard-won gains in gender equality. Africa must lead the charge,” he stressed.
Pedro warned that the right domestic policies can jump from a less than 17 percent ratio of tax revenues to gross domestic product to the 21.9 percent level currently observed in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Harnessing the region’s tropical forests and developing carbon markets could generate an estimated $82 billion a year, at $120 per tonne of captured CO2, and create 167 million additional jobs.
“This surpasses broken pledges of $100 billion for climate adaptation and mitigation,” he concluded.
According to the official ECA website, CoM2023 will run until March 21 under the theme “Promoting Africa’s recovery and transformation to reduce inequalities and vulnerabilities” and will also bring together representatives from member states and entities of the United Nations system.
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